


come lonely stormy nights

by isoladea



Category: Free!
Genre: M/M, Post-Episode 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-23 22:36:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/931867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isoladea/pseuds/isoladea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If there really was a deity above, Haru thought, surely he would be punished for this sinful, selfish act? Because he had read what Makoto needed in that exhalation, and found that he wanted it, desired what Makoto needed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	come lonely stormy nights

**Author's Note:**

> For Anon. Prompt: MakoHaru watching scary movies.
> 
> Warning: I veered off the prompt so badly that it's not even funny.

Come lonely stormy nights: if he strained his ears, he thought he could hear Makoto against the howls of the wind. Like an echo. Like the shivering vestiges of a nightmare. Usually, he dreamt of Makoto’s voice, woke up to his bedroom ceiling, listened carefully to the rain. Pitter-patter; a crack of thunder. Then nothing. Then Haru went back to sleep.

Then one day he did not wake up.  Stuck in his dream, he opened his eyes to the tent’s quaking roof, to the raging weather, to the ocean roaring mere feet away.  He thought to himself: I know how this one goes.  He stumbled out of his tent onto the bog-like sand; he followed the storyline.  The next tent was empty, yet still warm.  Somewhere out there, Makoto was straining against the swells of the waves and the pressing dark.

Strangely, he could not feel the rain.  But the sea he felt: in his dream, it was bitingly cold, and when he plunged into the waves, the saltwater grabbed him roughly and jerked him awake.  This time, for real.  On his bed, he gasped for air as if he had been taking a breath against the tide, against a long, tiring swim.

It took him a couple of breaths to see that there was only a nightmare, which was already retreating into the shadows.  The soft midnight dark.  The steady heavy downpour outside his window.  There was no thunder, save for the rumblings of his own ragged inhalations, his trembling exhalations.

His heart was beating too fast, too hard.  He had to press the heel of his palm against his left chest to assuage the phantom pain.  Afterwards, no sleep came to swoop him up.  Cradling his heart, he lay waiting, dry and warm, watching the storm fade into dawn.

On the first light, he slipped out of bed and treaded his way to the bathroom.  Carefully, as if he was afraid of stepping on the shards of his nightmare.  He opened the hot water tap as far as it would go, sat on the rim of the bathtub, listened to the torrential rush of water.  And felt, rather than saw, the steam rising, warm and gentle against his skin.

His clothes went into the hamper, his body into the bathwater.  His mind — he let it wander, allowed it to empty of fears and worries and thoughts, left it to travel.  The hot water lapped against him, devoid of any bite.

By the time Makoto arrived, the fog had left the mirror, and Haru was chin-deep in the lukewarm water, his arms around his knees.

“Good morning, Haru-chan,” Makoto said, and Haru reliably trotted out his retort: “Stop it with the –chan.”  He knew Makoto knew that, when their hands took hold of each other and Makoto coaxed him out of the water, his fingers were considerably far more wrinkled than usual.  There was that _look_ , flitting across Makoto’s expression.  Before Makoto could open his mouth, Haru looked away with a frown, letting Makoto read him even as he wondered whether there were bags under his eyes.

In the end, Makoto murmured, “Didn’t sleep well?” It was gently worded, and Haru knew that he could ignore the question if he wanted to.  So he did.  He stepped out of the bathtub, completely nude, and it was a testament to the sheer amount of _things_ they had had between them that Makoto did not even comment on it.  Makoto simply handed him his towel, and he used it to carelessly dry his hair before wrapping it around his waist.

“Breakfast?” he offered, walking past Makoto out of the bathroom, only half-hearing the “Yes, please,” that followed.  He had read the answer beforehand; he did not need to hear it.

He and Makoto had no memory of being introduced to each other, and therefore possessed no memory of life before one another.  To Haru, Makoto had always been there, the way Mother and Father and Grandmamma had always been there.  Then Father left, Mother followed, and one day, Grandmamma, too, left and never came back.  Then there was only Makoto.

The two of them — they had shared so many things that it was easier to list out the things they had _not_ shared.  Big things: Makoto’s fear of the ocean, Haru’s love and acceptance for it.  Little things, too.  No matter how well-received Haru was in the Tachibana household, one could not share one’s siblings.  Or one’s parents.  Under the family altar, there were boxes’ worth of Grandmamma’s collection of disaster movies and tragedies that Haru had never watched with Makoto.  And try as he might, Makoto had assured him that he would never grow to like the taste of pineapple and mackerel together.

The dream grew by night.  A wretched flower blooming in the recesses of his subconscious.  In the surging waters, he gathered Makoto into his arms and hung onto him tightly.  If, in reality, the water did not have Makoto that night, if Haru retrieved Makoto that night, by logic, he would manage to replicate the feat in his dreams.

Makoto was dead weight in his arms, but he tried not to think about it, because even without the thought, Makoto’s life was the heaviest thing he had ever had to carry.

The sea pummelled them both into the deep dark.  Haru was not afraid of it.  The waves, however, were another matter.  They tugged like arms.  Like cold clawed hands, drawing Makoto further away, deeper, into the capital beneath the waves.  Haru clung on tighter.  In reality, he had had no breath to spare.  In his dream, he told the water: you cannot have him.

He swam uncomprehending of direction, of the open sea, of land.  The water had to have heard him, because the waves ran them ashore.  One moment, he was pulling against the current one-handed; the next, he was tumbling across the shallows, over rough sand, cutting himself on seashell shards.  He lay on his side in the incoming tide, gasping and blinking against the rain.  He could no longer feel his arms, and for a breath, he thought he had lost Makoto.  Scrambling upright, he realised that they were still interlinked: his elbow twined around Makoto’s, his fingers in a frozen grip on Makoto’s wrist.

His mind was running without producing a coherent thought.  Nothing but the knowledge: he had to get Makoto out of the water’s reach.  The upward trek inland was the easy part.  A void in his thoughts.  Exhaustion heavy in his limbs.  The single-minded delusion that if he could get Makoto away from the water, then the water could not get Makoto.

When he collapsed on all fours in the downpour, he found himself wishing for the dream to end.  But he blinked, and he was still fisting handfuls of sand.  Pushing himself onto his knees, he noted how the wet sand slid from his hands, his trembling hands.

“Makoto,” he called out hoarsely, his hands clasping themselves onto Makoto’s shoulders, “Makoto.”

By then he was grasping.  Trying to remember what he had done that night.  It was strange — reality was supposed to be more terrifying, because it was real.  He thought that, perhaps, that night in the training camp was _the_ nightmare, and the dream he had been having was a mere re-enacting.  Reliving was the word, except his insides felt more like dying than living.  The past was a singularity; he had saved Makoto.  His dream, however, could twist whichever way the wind blew.

In this newfound uncertainty, he held onto Makoto and read out his lines from the script of his memory: “Makoto, wake up.  Makoto.”  Except soon it became a cry and a plea, a kind of mantra: “Makoto.  Wake up, wake up.  Makoto — ”

— Wake up.”

And he did.  Soaked to the bone, but it was only cold sweat and his tears.  In frustration, he whipped off his shirt, tossed it to the other end of his room.  The summer moon had spilt itself across his crumpled sheets and over his bare knees.  He sat up, drew his arms around his knees, hugged them close.  He wanted to blame Makoto for this, this weakness; he wanted to go to school early and leave Makoto standing in an empty bathroom, hurt and lost and perhaps a little lonely.  He could not, because he realised that one cold day, years ago, Makoto had gone through this, too.

So they had seen each other go down, seemingly to be taken away forever beneath the surface.  So they had seen each other lying unmoving on the ground.  His hands, when he pressed them over his eyes, were shaking.  He wondered if Makoto’s hands were trembling, too, on that day under the bridge.  Because now he remembered that _his_ had been shaking, while his thoughts spun away into the darkness, and he was only saved from the paralysis by the single idea: what would Makoto have done?

It dawned on him with the sunrise.  What was fair was fair.  So this had become something shared between them.  Except Makoto had been waiting for Haru to catch up for five years now.  Except Haru wished he could be selfish this once and never had to catch up.

But fair was fair, after all.

The sound — that _voice_ — travelled across the water: _“Rei!”_

It threw his rhythm off.  Mid-stroke, he froze.  Before he knew it, he had stopped swimming and was standing in the pool.  He was trying to think why he stopped, but when he brought his right hand to his chin, it was trembling.

He turned around, searched, looked.  In his haste to get into the pool, Rei had slipped and landed flat on his arse.  Nagisa had reversed his direction, swimming closer to Rei.  Makoto — Makoto was clambering out of the water to check on any possible injury.

From the other end of the pool, he watched as Nagisa and Makoto helped a sheepish Rei back onto his feet.  Neither Nagisa nor Rei had appeared in his dream so far.  He tried not to think too much into it.  He knew the answer, but that did not mean he had to like it.

He tried swimming a few more laps.  His arms felt leaden, and the water did nothing to soothe the weight away.  When he allowed Makoto to help him out of the pool, he wondered if his form had been as bad as Makoto’s face was telling him.

“Are you not feeling well?” Makoto prompted him.

Reflexively, he said, “I’m fine.”  His voice was tight.  He knew Makoto knew.

On their way home, Makoto looked him in the eye and asked, “Would you — would you mind if I stay over tonight, Haru-chan?”

The request made him feel queasy.  He imagined Makoto, lying on the spare futon that he might as well claim as his, still and silent in his sleep.  He did not want to see Makoto.  But they had shared their entire lives; Haru knew that they were best at reading what each other needed, not what each other wanted.  So he kept his eyes to the ground and said, “Do as you like.”  Which he knew, with Makoto, meant: do as you feel you need to do.  Which Makoto knew he knew.

The weather forecast spelt out another bout of summer storm approaching, under the cover of the night.

As expected, it did not go well.  Instead of dreaming, he did not dare to sleep altogether.  He lay on his side, his back to Makoto, waiting for the night to end.

Somewhere between the flash of lightning lighting up Makoto’s still, silent features and the following crack of thunder, Haru stood up, threaded his way between the bed and the futon carefully, and left.

He heard Makoto stir behind him, but he refused to look.  He closed the door; he walked away into the darkness of the house.

Grandmamma and he were alike.  Grandmamma herself said so.  They lost sleep on troubled nights.  They built havens out of abstractions.  Haru had his bath.  Grandmamma had her disaster movies and tragedies.

One night, when Haru had an awful cold _and_ was missing his parents terribly, when he was young enough to still miss his parents, he padded tearfully downstairs and found Grandmamma sitting in the dark, before the glowing telly.  She refused to draw him a bath — “Your cold will just get worse.” — but she pulled him close, let him rest his heavy head on her lap.  She had been watching a movie about the Holocaust; he remembered, because it was his first time hearing of the Holocaust.  “Look, Haruka,” she whispered, as prisoners’ bodies wasted away on the screen, “they’re dying.”  

The movie was already drawing to its end, and Grandmamma put on _Titanic_ next.  It was a twisted sort of comfort, since she knew how much he liked water, and how much water was involved in _Titanic_.  Her silent lips seemed to say: look, Haruka — as people fell into the freezing ocean and the captain sank with his ship — look at how inconsequential our troubles are.  How diminutive, compared to the things the characters in her movies faced: the Holocaust, a giant iceberg in the North Atlantic, the apocalypse.

On screen, the frigid ocean was flooding the machine room, but Haru barely felt the familiar tinge of exhilaration at the sheer display of the water’s power.  Why should he, when he had experienced it himself — those arms trying to tear away Makoto from his arms, into the deep — and won? He thought of Makoto lying still, dry and warm, in the futon upstairs, and his hands did not tremble.  It was progress.

Makoto found him right when Jack and Rose were plunging into the dark, churning waters — in absolute silence, since the volume was on mute — and Haru felt, rather than saw, him flinch and shudder.  “Haru,” Makoto whispered.  His voice — that voice was a question, a plea, and something infinitely sadder altogether.

Ever since he saw Makoto standing in the middle of the pool, as if frozen save for his trembling back, ever since five years ago, Haru decided that _Titanic_ , like all other Grandmamma’s movies, was not to be shared with Makoto.  Between the deep and the dark, the ocean and the drowning, it would have been cruelty to subject Makoto to it.  He wanted to stand up, to apologise, to switch off the telly and return the DVD back to its box, but Makoto beat him to it, sitting behind him and clutching at his shirt, peering at the screen from the top of Haru’s left shoulder.  They did not say a thing; Haru could barely hear Makoto breathe.

However, he could not deny the twist of guilt deep in his gut, as people began to freeze in the merciless water and Makoto rested his forehead against Haru’s shoulder, unable to make himself look at the screen anymore.  The hand gripping his shirt was trembling.  “Sorry,” he sighed, rubbing his face and moving to grab the remote.

Except Makoto had read what he needed, not what he wanted, and hung on.  He wrapped his shaking arms around Haru and buried his face in Haru’s nape, mouthing “Sorry,” on the skin there.

Except Haru had been dreaming of Makoto running heedlessly into the ocean for nearly a week now.  He could not be cruel to Makoto, but he was not feeling kind, either.  So when Jack had slipped away into the embrace of the ocean, when Rose was drifting in the lonely darkness, he whispered, “Makoto.  Look.”

Makoto’s chin was hovering somewhere above Haru’s shoulder.  His hold around Haru’s waist was tight, terrified.  They watched placidly as Rose sang her way through the night.  When the rescue boat oared its way through the statuesque victims, the icy death masks, when Rose had to swim and wrestle away a whistle from a dead man’s lips, Makoto let out a warm, shaky breath and pressed his face against Haru’s shoulder.

If there really was a deity above, Haru thought, surely he would be punished for this sinful, selfish act? Because he had read what Makoto needed in that exhalation, and found that he wanted it, desired what Makoto needed.  Slowly, imperceptibly, he tilted his head to the right, exposing his neck, allowing Makoto to bury his face in the crook of it, to inadvertently kiss his pulse and, in return, letting himself feel Makoto breathing against the dull roar of his blood.

Thousands of people died in the face of that North Atlantic iceberg.  The two of them going down was supposed to feel inconsequential in retrospect, but it did not.  Haru tried not to think too deeply of the reason, but it was late at night, it was dark, and he was too tired to deny anything.  So he placed his hands on top of Makoto’s, laced their fingers together, and tipped his weight backwards, so that he was leaning against Makoto to the latter’s strangled gasp.

Closing his eyes against the dream, the _Titanic_ , the storm, the world outside: ah, he mused, I just want to be embraced tonight.

**Author's Note:**

> I owe so many people so many apologies.
> 
> To the Anon OP: I am so sorry for the long wait, and I am beyond mortified by the fact that this fic has gone off the rails. I hit a rough patch while working this, and decided to rewrite the fic. No excuses. I hope you don't mind terribly.
> 
> To murasakihimu, my next prompter: I promised to upload the MakoHaruRin fill this weekend, but I won't be able to fulfill that promise. I'll try my best to finish it by early next week! *bows apologetically*
> 
> To the readers: I had been trying my hand on Haruka's 1st PoV, only to fail spectacularly, before reworking the fic entirely. I apologise for the half-baked, rather experimental style of this piece; if you've got any criticisms and/or input, please do share them!


End file.
